Mental Masturbatathon #3
Mental Masturbatathon #3 - PRETTY IN PINK - It’s better late than never - Porn, Sexuality and Commodification. I’ve had words with a few people who disagreed with previous issues, if you have enough to say email us a word and ill respond & chuck you in a hate-mail article
This one’s about porn. I tried my hardest to write a witty introduction to hook readers in. The best I could come up with was all ego-stroking x masturbation jokes - they’ve been done who knows how many times before - I don’t intend to write like a wannabe David Mitchell columnist that gets nasal laughs out of mortgage holders that spend their free time after office work solemnly sipping punk ipa’s in a brewdog.
I’ve got to discuss porn, I have thoughts about porn, quite frequently actually. It’s 2025 and porn is an acceptable thing, it’s not good that people have to resort to creating it to survive, but commodified sexuality and porn can be separated, and they need to be. Porn under capitalism is the epitome of evil, it’s an industry responsible for more than just the reprehensible abuse we are privy to, it’s also responsible for mercilessly killing off the one thing indebted to YOU by the cruel machinations of birth - SEX.
Sex is complicated and individual. It can be a passive currency to exchange for affection, a display of passion or even a sort of primal communion - if you haven’t had it, chances are that you’re obsessed over it. It’s both the purpose and failure of humankind. Debbie Harry wishes she invented sex - so do I - the rules could have been simpler that way if sex came from her rubbing sticks together like homosapiens finding fire
“I wish I had invented Sex - Sex is everything, and it’s number one ”
(Credits to Rex-Features for the image 1978)
For us, individuals that exist upon the fringes of polite society, Sex and Porn are bread and butter, you are both fetishised and abhorred for looking and acting differently - and you are expected to sexually behave in one of the two camps, the literal ins or outs - it is preconceived exploitation
Sex and porn can be both exploitative and beautiful - a lot of modern discussion around the two fails to recognise these two aren’t mutually exclusive, however, an incredible development of the 2010s has been separating a worker from their industry, an uber driver doesn’t necessarily represent uber, they primarily represent themselves - even though they are under the shackles of a multinational transportation empire. The same is true for Pornography, allowing a sex craved general public to be cognitively dissonant about the realities of Sexploitation - Onlyfans, Twitter (not calling it x im not a buffoon) and countless other sites are all about this. The solo online pornagraphic industry has done its utmost to estrange its idols and present itself as a sort of individualistic hustle. “This self-driven endeavour can get you rich quickly”. The nature of the “NEW PORNOGRAPHY” (as I’m calling it) is one in which consumers march through a pornographer’s life, take what they want (sex, with no strings attached) and don’t stop long enough to remove their coats.
The NEW PORNOGRAPHY is something that our successors will be dealing with for generations to come. It is our responsibility as the firstborn of the 21st century to ensure that NEW PORNOGRAPHY is reformed from company-focused to individual-focused models to combat industrial sexploitation.
